Customer experience management has the unfortunate distinction as sometimes being viewed as a luxury rather than a necessity. Successful brands understand that this couldn’t be further from the truth. CX management is a vital part of lead generation, customer retention, capitalizing on customer feedback, and has the potential to turn one-time consumers into long-time brand advocates. As with many things, simply putting an emphasis on customer experience management may not be enough. It is vital to identify and follow through with the customer experience management solutions which will truly make a difference.
Customer Experience as a Brand Priority
The best customer experiences start from the ground up. Excellent customer service and meeting customer expectations is great, but to maximize positive customer experience, it must become an integral part of your company’s branding strategy. This can be accomplished in several ways, including:
Developing a clear brand personality. Customers want to understand your brand. They want to know who you are and what you stand for. A well-defined brand personality tells the public what your core values are and how you intend to deliver those values through your products.
Developing a connection between your brand and your customers. Of course, the most well-defined brand personality in the world won’t do much good if it doesn’t resonate with your customer base. Be sure to align your brand and match your branding materials to the audience you intend to reach.
Build customer experience into your company culture. Famous examples of putting the customer first include e-commerce giants Amazon and Zappos. Zappos in particular prominently features their 10 core values including “delivering WOW service” and “create fun and a little weirdness” on their website. More importantly, this talk is backed up by a generous 100% return policy within a year of purchase and an emphasis on excellent customer service.
Using Brand Analytics to Improve CX Management
Customer experience management isn’t all sunshine and rainbows. The best CX management solutions are built on robust data analysis and customer behavior models. It can be easy for large companies to become blind to their own weaknesses and strengths through force of habit. Instead, successful brands should be looking to constantly monitor their existing and prospective customers for opportunities to improve customer experience. Some of the most useful customer experience brand metrics include:
- Customer loyalty: are one-time buyers turning into repeat customers? Are repeat customers turning into brand evangelists? Or are your sales fizzling out over time? Return customers are perhaps the strongest measure of a healthy CX management program.
- Conversions: with modern data points like clicks, bounce rate, and conversion rates, it is easy to pinpoint exactly where your brand gains and loses sales. Analyzing this data makes it possible to identify weaknesses in your path to purchase which can be improved for great customer experience satisfaction.
- Net Promoter Score (NPS): the NPS is a measure of how likely customers are to recommend your product(s) to family, friends, colleagues, etc. This is essentially a metric of brand advocacy from -100 to 100.
- Churn rate: new business might be more expensive, but old business is more lucrative. Churn rate determines how much of your book of business left within a certain time frame. Unavoidable circumstances notwithstanding, happy clients generally will not leave. Low churn rate is a good indicator of a good customer experience.
Customize Your CX Management Solutions for Best Results
Successful companies prioritize customer experience management. That much is clear. What is less clear is how companies can use this prioritization to yield actionable feedback, policies, and ultimately to strengthen their brand. The solution is to customize customer management programs to pinpoint exactly what will offer the most bang for your buck.
A robust CX management service will allow brands to set triggers for any aspect of customer feedback and/or brand metric within any data subset. For example, let’s say you are looking to gain more traction within the Gen Z market in lower to middle class areas. Some customer experience management software can pinpoint individuals born between 1996-2010 who live in neighborhoods with a controlled median household income.
Identifying the subjects of your data analysis is only one third of the equation. Another third is determining what metrics are the most important. Brands can set customizable trigger points for NPS, conversions, locations, customer retention, and much more. The final third is taking the results of your customer feedback and turning it into customer experience management solutions. These customer feedback loops are the lynchpin to not only meeting customer needs, but anticipating and exceeding their needs as well.
Clock Tower Insight Offers Customer Experience Management Solutions
Clock Tower Insight helps our clients to build their brands through any means necessary. We believe in using cutting edge research to deliver unparalleled insight and understanding into today’s rapidly changing marketplace. With over 15 years of dedicated experience, our marketing insight has helped organizations including Belle Tire, Nielsen, Orbitz, and Kraft Foods.
We are proud to offer a number of services to our clients, including customer experience management, brand positioning in the marketplace, market sizing, market testing, and more.